In today's multi-tasking environments, users generally interact with computers through graphical user interfaces. Typically, these graphical user interfaces display an application's content within graphical windows on a display screen. Although multiple graphical windows can arise from a single program on a computer, the usual display screen includes windows from different programs executing independently of each other on the computer, or even several different computers.
With the development of faster computers having better graphical and multi-tasking capabilities, users may display a large number of windows on a desktop at any one time causing some windows on the display to overlap or obscure other windows. In order to view the obscured information, a user may resize or move the obstructing windows. This, however, may result in perhaps only seeing a portion of the desired information. Larger screen sizes and multiple monitors have been used to get around such a problem, but they are very expensive and can take up much desktop space. What is needed are new ways of interacting with windows in graphical user interfaces.
Typically, a user interacts with windows through various input devices, including a keyboard and a pointer device, such as a mouse. Many windowing systems provide mouse information to an application when the mouse pointer is located within an application's window boundary. Additionally, many applications rely on the mouse pointer being within its boundaries when manipulating the window by moving, resizing, selecting menu items, and the like. For example, the user may open a menu by locating the mouse pointer over a graphical menu and selecting the menu. As long as the mouse pointer remains over the menu, the menu will be visible. If the mouse pointer is moved outside of the menu's boundaries, however, the menu may disappear because the application assumes that the user is no longer interested in the menu.
Currently, there is no way of interacting with a graphical representation of a window as though the representation was a window object itself. While a user can apply transformations and effects to images on graphical displays, the user is not able to manipulate the graphical display through standard graphical user interface techniques. Accordingly, there is a need for a system and method for redirecting input so that a user may manipulate graphical images as if those images were window objects themselves.